The invention is a computer implemented method, device, system, or article for reconstructing a surface of an object. In particular, the invention comprises estimating a non-convex hull signed distance function parameters from a data set of an object and evaluating the non-convex hull signed distance function on vertices of a volumetric mesh. The invention further comprises approximating the zero level set of the non-convex hull signed distance function by a polygonal mesh using an isosurface algorithm to provide surface reconstruction of an object.
Oriented point clouds are usually obtained using optical measuring devices such as laser scanners and structured lighting systems, or by other computational means such as multi-view stereo reconstruction and other simulation algorithms. Dense colored oriented point clouds have become a pervasive surface representation in computer graphics.
The prior art on surface reconstruction from point clouds is extensive, spanning more than two decades. But despite its long history, the area is still very active. One family of algorithms produces interpolating polygon meshes where all or some of the input points become vertices of the polygons. Many of these algorithms are combinatorial in nature, and come with differing reconstruction quality.
To compensate for measurement errors, various representations for the reconstructed surface have been considered. Since the implicit representation provides watertight surfaces, most surface reconstruction methods in this category produce implicit surfaces. Prior art examples include reconstructing a binary indicator function and fitting and blending, or moving least squares based on local function. Most of these methods have issues in solving large scale numerical optimization problems.
Even though the implicit functions produced by some of these approximating methods have explicit analytic forms, since polygon meshes are usually needed for visualization or further computation purposes, the implicit function is often evaluated on a regular grid of sufficient resolution. However, the cost of evaluating the implicit function on a regular grid is often excessive.
Notwithstanding the prior art, it would therefore be desirable to provide a more efficient and optimized method, device, or article for reconstructing a surface of an object.